Zoompf Gets Acquired!

We are so excited to announce that Zoompf has been acquired by Rigor, a leader in the web performance monitoring industry!

Usually when a company gets acquired they will write some sales-y fluff piece full of hackneyed buzzwords like "synergy" or "game-changer" and generic statements about how the companies will work together. But that’s just not our style. Instead, we would rather tell you plainly and from our hearts why we decided to do this, why we think this is an awesome opportunity for all of our customers, and how this merger will benefit you, our awesome customers!

Why We Built Zoompf

We started Zoompf back in late 2009 because the performance industry seemed insane to us. At the time, website owners were buying hundreds of millions of dollars of thick-client, complex load testing software. The funny thing, though, is that whenever we would analyze one of these “tested” sites, we’d frequently find numerous high impact performance problems that were unknown or completely ignored by the site owners. Huge problems like not using HTTP compression, grossly unoptimized images, and complete lack of resource caching. Clearly something wasn’t working.

After consulting with literally hundreds of website owners, we found these problems existed primarily for these reasons:

Existing tools only told you how fast you are. No tools would tell you what to do to get faster.

No one was responsible for testing performance defects. QA teams looked for functional problems, and maybe they would do load tests, but no one was testing for front end performance problems.

Even if someone was testing for performance defects, it was a complex and time consuming process, often involving piecing together diverse results from a wide variety of free tools. This approach isn’t fast, consistent, or repeatable, so defects were commonly slipping into production sites.

When a performance defect was detected, education on why the problem was important or how to resolve it comprehensively was lacking in the organization.

With Zoompf, we solved all of these problems: Zoompf can scan a single page, use a script to walk through a specific user flow, or crawl an entire website. Zoompf checks for over 415 performance defects and provides step-by-step instructions to solve each problem. And we have had tremendous success helping companies not only find issues, but acting as an automated safety net ensuring they aren’t introducing new performance problems when making changes to the site.

Rigor: Reinvigorating Performance Monitoring

While the team was building Zoompf, Rigor was shaking up the synthetic performance monitoring space. Everyone knows the legacy players in this space: Grossly expensive, hard to use, thick-client monitoring products that in many cases predate the dot-com crash. This was a market that sorely needed innovation.

Rigor brought to that market a SaaS-based app with a modern, easy to use UI with a world-wide network of monitoring locations and amazing visualizations so anyone could understand their site’s performance metrics over time. The rise of cloud computing and visualization allowed Rigor to provide an enterprise grade product at a fraction of the price of the incumbent players. The results have been incredible: fast growth while being selected as the #1 place to work in Atlanta.

Complementary Solutions

The constant website monitoring of Rigor is a great way for businesses to answer the question "how fast is my site?" and to alert you when your site gets slower. The next logical question for a business is "what can I do to be faster?" Since Zoompf’s root cause analysis provides this answer, it’s the perfect complement to performance monitoring. Even better, the benefits flow in the other direction as well!

At Zoompf, we are often asked "if I make this suggested optimization, how much faster will my site become?". This is a pretty difficult question to answer in isolation. However, once paired with Rigor, Zoompf has access to a vast amount of historic performance metrics to know the impact of the different performance optimizations.

Imagine this situation: You make an update to your website when Rigor alerts you that your site’s start_render time has gotten 400 ms slower. Inside the Rigor application, you trigger a Zoompf performance scan to diagnose this new problem. A few seconds later Zoompf detects a new change to one of your style sheets caused the slowdown. Following the directions provided by Zoompf, you apply the fix, and confirm via Rigor that your site is indeed loading faster now!

Or imagine this: Your team is under pressure to improve your site’s performance. You kick off your development sprint by running Zoompf to prioritize what performance defects to fix. In parallel, you start a Rigor monitor against your staging environment. As you fix those performance defects, Rigor confirms your site is indeed speeding up! After you deploy, you hook Zoompf into your Continuous Integration build process to make sure those performance defects never return!

This new reality is what gets us so excited! The ability to directly link your site performance metrics to the quality of your code in an automated, repeatable fashion will dramatically simplify the process for keeping your website fast.

The Journey Forward

There is no other company that has a root cause analysis engine like Zoompf, and no solution integrates these results into a monitoring platform. That is…until today.

That’s right, today, to celebrate the merger, we are also happy to announce that Zoompf’s analysis engine is already integrated into Rigor’s monitoring platform! With one button click, website monitoring data can instantly be analyzed to determine the exact cause of any performance slowdown! There’s a lot of great stuff here, so check out more details about this integration over in the Rigor blog.

We are so happy to be joining the Rigor team and working to advance the web platform. The Zoompf founders Billy and Mark are both continuing on in leadership roles inside of Rigor and are committed to blending monitoring and root cause analysis into the best web performance platform on the market. To learn more about this merger, and our plans for the future, be sure to read Rigor CEO Craig Hyde’s announcement over on Rigor.com

Thank you to our customers, advisers, supporters and friends for all the help and encouragement they have provided over the last several years. We look forward to continuing this next part of the journey!